Prevent temporary object files hitting disk in MSVC

Question

Say I have a CPP file called test.cpp. On Ubuntu using gcc 9.3.0 I can use these commands:

• gcc -c test.cpp (creates object file test.o)
• gcc test.o -o test.out (creates executable test.out from object file test.o)
• gcc test.cpp -o test.out (creates only the final executable test.out)

The last option is great since no intermediate object files remain after compilation. (I'm unsure whether gcc is doing everything in-memory, or whether object files are temporarily hitting disk before being cleaned up during linking).

On Windows, cl test.cpp /link /out:test.exe creates the executable test.exe, but also the object file test.obj.

Is there a way to prevent MSVC from creating the intermediate object files? Alternatively, is there a link option to ask MSVC to clean up?

Answer 1

No. The best you can do is use the /Fo flag to dump the .obj file under %TMPDIR% or so.

Don't do this for large builds, as foo/Bar.cpp and qux/Bar.cpp will map to Bar.obj and give you very interesting compilation/linking errors.